Thursday, February 28, 2013

Sadly, we
now have seven active remotes in our living room (TV, DVR, Blu-Ray, DVD, Wii,
Speakers, and AC, I think).I
consider this to be an annoyance, but my wife (usually a sweet-tempered soul)
considers this to be an affront.It offends her sense of how the world
should work.Whenever I fumble
with the pile of remotes, she indignantly laments aloud that she would have no
idea how to turn on her own TV if her life depended on it.

But…is that
true?

We’re
talking about a massive amount of time and resources she’s already invested
here:over a thousand of dollars
worth of equipment we have acquired over ten years of marriage, hundreds of
DVDs she has purchased or received, an infinite cornucopia of cable and Netflix
programming now available instantly. All denied to her.

Now you have
to understand, my wife is very technically proficient.Over at her own
much-more-successful-than-mine blog, she codes her own html and creates and
embeds sophisticated videos and podcasts.Tech does not intimidate her.

So why does
she declare that all is lost when the remotes come out?I mean yeah, it’s annoying, but there’s
basically a five-step protocol to determine which remotes to use in which
order.It would take her maybe ten
minutes to learn it and then she’d know it forever (or until we get our eighth
remote.)Considering that she’s
about a dozen times smarter than me, this wouldn’t be a big strain for
her.

But I
totally believe her when she says she can’t learn it.Of course she can’t.And here’s why: she feels that she
shouldn’t have to. And as long as anyone feels that way, learning is
impossible.

I’m the last
person to cast aspersions here.I
have wasted years of my life refusing to learn things that would have taken me
an hour or two to master, simply because I thought that I shouldn’t have
to. That’s
mostly what this blog is all about.Every time I figure out something new, like with the last two rules, it seems
so obvious as soon as I say it, so why did it take me so long to figure out?

But
eventually you figure out that the people telling you this have had no success
of their own.You realize that
even a brilliantly original iconoclast like Hunter S. Thompson taught himself to write
by re-typing “The Great Gatsby” word for word.You realize, in other words, that writers, like everybody
else, have to learn to do what they do by analyzing what came before.In the end, you have to learn all those
rules that everybody says you shouldn’t have to learn.

That’s the real hard work of learning to
write: learning to accept that you need to learn it.If you can do that, you’re 90% of the way there.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Obviously,
in most scenes you write, your hero will be in
the scene, and will also be the hero of
the scene, aka: the person we admire and want to see triumph in this
interaction.But that’s not always
the case.

In some
scenes, even if the overall hero of the story is present, the audience is
actually rooting for someone else. Sometimes we’re rooting for someone else to set the hero straight.Frequently, for instance, when Buffy and Willow disagreed, the audience sided with Willow.Buffy was better in a fight, which made her the capital-H “Hero” of the
show, but Willow was wiser, which made her the “hero-of-the-scene” for most of her
scenes with Buffy.

And what
about scenes that don’t have any of our “heroes”?There still needs to be conflict within that scene, and the
audience should be able to pick a favorite to root for in that conflict.Think of the scene in Die Hard where we
cut away to the local news coverage: the anchorman mistakenly refers to
Stockholm Syndrome as “Helsinki Syndrome” and his co-anchor rolls her
eyes.Even this small scene has
its own hero and villain.

Even if the
scene merely consists of two villains, then that scene also needs its own “hero” that we want to see “triumph” in this interaction. We should admire one villain’s reaction
to this situation (even it’s only to admire the competence of his or her
villainy) and we should disdain the other.

If your hero
and villain keep running circles around inferior scene partners in separate scenes, then the audience will get
more and more excited about their eventual confrontation. The audience will start
saying, “Wow, these two both dominate every scene they’re in!What happens when they’re finally in a
scene together?”Which one will continue to dominate,
and which will be humbled for the first time?

This rule is
something you need to keep in mind when you’re building your ensemble: You have to multiply everything by two.It’s tempting to say, “Okay, the aliens
invade and we show how the whole town reacts, so we cut back and forth between
the sheriff and the priest, and the school teacher, and the general at the army
base, and...”Wait, stop!In order to write actual scenes, you’re actually going to need two cops, two priests, two school
teachers, two army commanders, etc,
at each location.And each of
those pairs need contrasting personalities because you’ll need to have conflict between the scene
partners.Doesn’t that make you
re-think you inclination to have so many settings?

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Here’s
another big breakthrough for my understanding of structure.There’s a big paradox in the rules of sympathy/empathy that I somehow
never noticed for all these years.We all know that, on the one hand…

On first
glance, this makes no sense. How can the audience demand that the hero be
proactive, and yet also disapprove of a hero for choosing the time and place of
the climax?If your hero is planning
everything, then shouldn’t the final battle happen exactly when he or she wants
it to happen?And shouldn’t the
hero have cleverly and competently accounted for everything, and therefore no longer be the underdog?

Luckily,
there’s one simple solution that resolves this paradox and solves all of these
problems.Yes, the hero should
plan when and where the finale will take place, but then the bad guy (or some
other outside event) suddenly moves up the
timeline.

As soon as
you notice this trick, you’ll suddenly see it everywhere.

I now
realize that this is what was going on in Star
Wars: “We’ve stole the plans that will allow us to attack the Death Star
(Yay, proactive!), but before we can attack it at any old time (Boring, too
powerful), it showed up to attack us! (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and
maybe fail! And it explains how they were able to get away before!) (As I
pointed out in this post, the whole idea that the Death Star was also attacking
them was added in post-production.)

And for that
matter in Empire Strikes Back: I’m
finally going to take the initiative to get trained in the Force by Yoda (Yah,
proactive!) But I have to cut training short against his wishes because Vader
is attacking my friends. (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!)

Likewise in
the original cut, (but not the final cut) of The Terminator.We’re
attacking the lab that will make the Terminators (Yay, proactive!), but the Terminator has figured out what we’re doing and he’s lying in wait to attack us
(Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!) (In the final cut, Cameron
decided to chop out the turn to proactivity, and save it for the sequel.In this case, nobody missed it.)

This trick allows
the good guys to fall way behind without losing
our sympathy.If the good guys execute their plan just the way they wanted to, and yet it all goes
wrong, then they look like idiots.But if they’re suddenly forced to improvise and they screw up, then we
sympathize— Hey, they did the best they could in a tough situation!At least they didn’t sit around waiting
to react, they were preparing to take the fight to the villain…but then the
villain suddenly took the fight to them.That’s how to be a proactive
underdog.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

This was a
love-it-or-hate-it movie.Every
time I tell someone that this was my favorite movie of the year, I find myself
doing so with an apologetic tone, expecting to receive exasperation in return,
but I’ve been pleasantly surprised more than once to hear instead, “Thank
you!I thought I was the only
one!”

Rules it exemplified:

The Past is a Foreign Country, So Learn the Language: My favorite thing about The
Master was that I wasn't thinking at all about screenwriting or other
movies as I watched it.Instead, I
was overwhelmed by memories of my two grandfathers.Despite the fact that they were extremely different men,
Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell was a fascinating combination of the two at their most
troubled.I felt like Phoenix must
have known them personally to capture them so well.PTA and his actors captured the lost language of the ‘50s
with uncanny precision.

Every Hero Must be Volatile: Overall, I
loved how the movie, thanks to Phoenix and Hoffman's unbridled, unfiltered
performances, seemed to hum with volatility in every scene.I was squirming in my seat the whole
time, fearing the next inevitable combustion of matter and anti-matter.

Show Us a Relationship We Haven’t Seen Before:The movie did what I
never thought it could do: make me sympathetic to Scientology, by putting it in
its proper historical context of the PTSD-wracked ‘50s and showing that, for
thoroughly-damaged individuals like Freddie, who were impervious to
conventional psychotherapy, only direct confrontation by a fellow nutjob
provided any hope of self-help.The violently symbiotic relationship that the two form is utterly
believable to me and yet unlike anything I’ve seen onscreen.I debated in my head for days whether or not the positive results (for Freddie) justified Hoffman’s
megalomania.

Don't get me
wrong, like almost everything else I saw this year, the movie was somewhat
bloated and shapeless, and not the sort of thing that anyone should try at
home, but Paul Thomas Anderson transcends traditional moviemaking wisdom here
and writes with lightning onto the screen. For once, I’ll have a not-so-anxious Oscar night, because the movie I think should win isn’t even nominated.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

A Hero Needs Special Skills Learned in the Past:
The lesson of Lincoln, and Lincoln,
is that the greatest weapon a president can have is the ability to disarm (and
thereby defang) his adversaries, which Lincoln does with an endless
stream of inappropriate (but pointed) back-woods humor. (This isa weapon that LBJ and
GWB also wielded expertly, for good or ill).Kushner and Day-Lewis masterfully recreate Lincoln’s canny charade: folksy hick on the surface, quick-eyed political mongoose
underneath.

A Movie is About a Person’s Problem:
Kushner famously started out by attempting to cover 1863-65, but he got though
hundreds of pages without making it to 1864, so he started over.Then he tried to just cover the four
months of 1865, which turned out to be 500 pages!(Somebody publish that version please!)Spielberg, to his infinite credit, got
to page 100 and said, “Hey, that’s a movie right there, let’s just stop at the
end of January.”This isn’t really
a bio-pic: it’s just the story of one problem: the passing of the 13th Amendment in the House.Of course, in Kushner’s
capable hands, that’s enough to give a full and rich portrait of the man with
the plan.

...Since I
seemed overly-dismissive on that point last time, let me describe in a little
more detail how this seemed to be different from the Spielberg I’d come to know
and loathe.My chief problem is
Spielberg’s tendency to eliminate all irony and ambiguity from his movies.I discussed Amistad last time, but
there are so many more examples…

The real
Oskar Schindler was just as heroic but far less saintly than the movie version,
and he would have made for a more complex and human movie.

After a nice
tense scene in Saving Private Ryan in
which the platoon is left riven with doubt about whether or not they should
have let that German go, he helpfully comes back and kills off a few of them,
eliminating all ambiguity…

…and my
all-time favorite example: The titular reports in “Minority Report” (indicating
uncertainly about what the future will bring) turn out to be mere red herrings,
and in fact Tom Cruise was falsely fingered for the crime not because of any
unknowable gap between fate and free will, but simply because he was framed by
his boss.

There were
still glimpses of these problem in Lincoln:
John Williams’s clunky score shifts gears between “this is a meaningful scene”
and “this is a funny scene” with all the subtlety of a record-scratch, and
Janusz Kaminski’s typically over-pretty cinematography tends to ladle on the
pseudo-profundity at precisely those moments that Day-Lewis would rather
underplay.

My reflexive
distaste for Spielberg is still strong enough that I give most of the credit
for this movie to Kushner and Day-Lewis, but I am nevertheless willing to admit
that the old duffer left me very pleasantly surprised this time around.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Allow me to warn
you upfront that my attempts to praise Argo
may get buried under complaints about Zero
Dark Thirty. They make for such a perfect Goofus and Gallant pairing.

Rules It Exemplifies:

Know the Way the World Works: What
makes Argo so good is the same thing
that made Zero Dark Thirty so phony.ZDT
shows us what the CIA wishes it was:
swaggering, hyper-focused, ultra-serious ass-kickers in a world full of
pansies. It attempts to re-write a sloppy, shameful, sadistic, ten-year-long
fiasco into a brilliant step-by-step manhunt by Very Serious People. Argo, on the other hand, starts by
admitting the simple truth: The CIA, by design, is an agency of last
resort.All they can do, at their
best, is dive into messy situations and try to make the most of the mess. ZDT imagines stoic superheroes doing
righteous work in a black and white world (or, more to the point, white vs.
brown), while Argo’s spies are
everyday schlubs doing an absurd job in morally-murky situations the best way
they know how.Argo had its own falsifications
(pretending they were almost caught at the end when they weren’t) but,
crucially, its not lying to itself, or us, about how the world works.

Listen to Real Cops and Criminals: I’ve
read way too many CIA memoirs and the casual argot in Argo rang true in so many little ways, whereas every macho “You
can’t handle the truth!” line in ZDT
rang laughably false.(ZDT actually showed one of its not-tough-enough bosses
practicing his putting in the office!Base your details on original observations, not clichés that you picked
up from old New Yorker cartoons!)

Ideas are the Enemy of Observations:
But Affleck’s eye for detail also serves a deeper purpose.He keeps circumventing our urge to form
parallels between this story and our current troubles.Instead, he keeps reminding us that
1979 is a foreign country, giving us an avalanche of amusing “I forgot all
about that!” period details (I love the wrecked Hollywood sign!). His
all-too-human Iranians (sometimes scary, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes both)
would rather look back to 1953 than look ahead to 2012.

Monday, February 18, 2013

I thought Inglorious Basterds was good but
very overrated, so I was quite surprised at how much better I liked this
follow-up...

Rules It Exemplifies:

Genius Doesn’t Innovate, It Cultivates:
At first, Tarantino wanted to be Godard, (he even named his production company A Band Apart) and they did have certain
things in common: both were bold, visceral, post-modern, wildly talented
bad-boy rulebreakers. But it soon became clear that Tarantino would never
measure up.Where Godard was lean,
Tarantino was bloated, where Godard was prolific, Tarantino dawdled.Each contrast favors Godard over his
imitator: sublime vs. juvenile, poetic vs. ham-handed, visionary vs.
derivative…But now, with his two
latest movies, Tarantino has finally come into his own.He’ll never equal Godard, but he now
stands within spitting distance of inheriting the legacy of one of Godard’s
great influences: Sam Fuller.Fuller’s movies were deranged tabloid visions of America at its best and
worst extremes.He sacrificed
sensitivity and subtly in favor of telling the raw truth as he saw it.His movies were bracing, brutal, and
bizarre, with peripatetic, episodic structures that forced you to re-set your
narrative expectations.This is
the legacy that Tarantino has belatedly embraced. Django lines up nicely alongside Fuller mid-period masterpieces, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, as a full-throated howl of unfocussed American
rage.

Plot Motivates, Character Complicates.Though this movie is once again
self-indulgent and too long, I give Tarantino credit for pulling way back on
the amount of plot.In the movie’s
best scene, the plot has seemingly resolved…but one of our heroes just can’t
resist his overwhelming urge to vent his spleen and ruin it all.Tarantino is finally learning that, in
the second half, volatile character complications should drive the conflict,
not an endless torrent of external plot events.

Villains Need a Solid Motivation, Too:
Yes, the gore was typically excessive, but for once it wasn’t driven by
meaningless psychopathy. I was delighted to finally discover a movie in which
the villains were not motivated by a
love of chaos.Leonardo
DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, give horrifically logical
performances.Both characters
coolly and calmly pursue their own best interests (and neither actor winks to
us to let us know that he doesn’t approve).In this movie, everybody only wants what they want.Nobody wants to do good for good’s
sake, and nobody want to do evil for evil’s sake.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

I’ve already spoiled the results, but you guys have convinced to go back and show my work, so once again, here’s my annual Oscar week best-of. As with all
of Adam McCay’s movies (though he was only a producer and co-writer on this
one), The Campaign is meandering and bloated, with a fairly random second half, but, as usual, he
somehow got me to check my narrative expectations at the door and go
along with the jokes.

Rules It Exemplifies:

Invest Possessions With Emotion:
Specifically Zach Galifianakis’s pugs, who serve many purposes here.They start out as just an opportunity
to “pet the dog” (establish quick sympathy) and show what a down-home guy he
is, but then Will Farrell attacks him for having Chinese dogs, so his campaign
manager makes him kick his real dogs out and replace them with manlier American
dogs.From this point on, the exiled pugs lurk outside Galifianakis’s house, staring in accusingly as everything
that goes on inside, nicely representing his excised conscience. We know what it will mean when he lets the pugs in...

Comedy Requires Pain:I can get bored with political stories in which
neither party is identified.I’m
the first to admit that both parties are just about equally corrupt these days,
but that’s doesn’t mean that they’re corrupt in thesame way.These
“who knows which party it is?” stories deny themselves the gift of specificity,
limiting themselves to strictly generic observations.This movie scores more effective points against both parties
by naming names.

This is the sort of world where…: The
reason I hired a babysitter and went out and saw this movie was because of the bust-a-gut trailer moment when Will Farrell punched out a baby.Now you know that I’ve complained about
CGI, but here (as with this other rare exception), it was a boon: If the
punching of that baby had been at all realistic, nobody would have
laughed.But the slo-mo ripple of
the punch across the baby’s face makes the joke work because it’s not realistic...Comedy requires pain, but just enough
pain to get a big laugh that doesn’t turn into a scream.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

In response to my last post, some of you suggested that I write more about recent movies. And, indeed, this is the time of year that I usually talk about my favorite Hollywood movies of the year and how they reflect various pieces of advice that I’ve given. In preparation for just such a piece, I got caught up on a lot of movies from this year…and I was kind of horrified.

Picture above is Entertainment Weekly’s averaged-out grades (albeit using a bizarre selection of critics) for most of the movies that came out this year. I’ve added the running time for each one, and my own grade for the ones I saw. (“F” means that no scene impressed me, “A” means every scene impressed me.)

Looking at the results, you’ll notice a few things:

In most cases, my grade is much lower than the critical average, often extremely so.

The running times of almost every one is obscenely bloated. Not one of these movies needed to be longer than two hours. Even my favorite, The Master, could have shed those extra 24 minutes and not missed them.

But the real problem, of course, is that almost all of these movies were either sequels, remakes, adaptations, or written/commissioned by the director. Almost none, in other words, were “original specs” purchased on the screenwriting market.

(Two movies that I thought were surprisingly not-bad, Safe House and The Campaign, are missing from EW’s list. I would have given both a solid “B”, and both, I’m glad to say, were based on original specs. Dredd is also missing, which, despite fairly good reviews, I would have given another “F”.)

Based on this evidence, I see causes for concern:

Clearly, my tastes are drifting further from the critical consensus, which makes me feel increasingly unfit to speak to what sort of movies people should be writing.

I primarily aim my advice to writers of original spec screenplays, but the market for such screenplays has almost entirely disappeared.

The increase in running time is an indicator, above all, of clout: The studios are so skittish that they say “no” every chance they get. As a result the only movies that actually get made are projects that no one at the studio is allowed to second-guess or say no to, either because of the director’s clout, the franchise’s profitability, or both. These aren’t movies, they’re juggernauts, and they simply steamroll over producers, critics and audiences, pummeling all three into submission.

So what is an amateur screenwriter to do? The answer, quixotically, is to continue writing original specs anyway. Even if they sell, there is almost no chance that they will get made, but you have to sell one or two first in order to be considered for the remake/sequel/adaptation assignments that make up almost all of the available work, for now and for the foreseeable future. But it becomes increasingly hard to know if you’re doing a good job, because there are almost no successful examples to compare yourself to, (and those that do sneak through hardly inspire would-be writers to greatness.)

In the meantime, do I write a best-of? Part of the problem is that even the movies I liked best were profoundly weird. I thought The Master, Lincoln, and Django were all pretty great, but would I really advise any writers to emulate them? These, too, were “clout” movies, totally insulated from the pressures of the market. Each does a lot of things that original specs simply aren’t allowed to do, so what’s the point?

This all helps explain my lack of recent posts, but rest assured that I have been developing some in-depth new material, including a brand new Ultimate Checklist that will debut soon, so stay tuned. (And the book is coming along nicely, too!) Meanwhile, I should probably take the advice of some of you and start looking again to older movies for inspiration and analysis, hoping to protect the wisdom of the past until the barbarian hordes have passed and a new movie renaissance can begin.

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Hi, guys, sorry for the no-warning black-out. I suddenly got sick and tired of hearing myself pontificate. I do miss blogging, though, and I intend to come back soon, but I'd like some suggestions for what would you guys would like to see next. I've gotten some emails with some good suggestions but I thought I'd throw it open to everybody. What topics have I not yet covered? What ramifications of my past pieces have I not yet considered? Any old features you'd like to see return? Let me know, and maybe you'll see that topic soon. (And be sure to check out this neat, new Pulp-o-mizer!)